MAGA right’s new fascist man-crush: He’s been dead for 50 years

There’s a strange circular relationship between the authoritarian movement in America symbolized or spearheaded by Donald Trump — whether or not he is truly its leader — and the European far right. It’s like a malevolent Ouroboros, where we can’t tell which is the head and which the tail, or which end is swallowing the other.

It’s clear that some right-wing activists and political leaders in Europe still seek inspiration from or alignment with Trump, even as his star visibly fades. Both the president and many of his key advisers and followers remain fascinated, if not obsessed, with the continent from which nearly all white Americans derive their ancestry. But this obsession is so clouded by ignorance and false assumptions that the nature and direction of the relationship is never straightforward.

As I wrote recently, Elon Musk’s fixation with Britain’s current social and political crisis seems to be rooted in misbegotten anglophile nostalgia and a grotesque misreading of “The Lord of the Rings.” His theatrical embrace of the racist hustler known as Tommy Robinson — viewed as a pariah even by Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant Reform UK party — has only made Musk look like a hapless clown to the British public, if an obscenely rich one. Clumsy efforts by JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Musk and other Trump surrogates to meddle in Germany’s national elections on behalf of the almost-fascist AfD party seemed to backfire, as anyone with the remotest understanding of contemporary European politics could have predicted.

If Hungary’s strongman prime minister, Viktor Orbán, remains firmly tethered to the Trumpist right and the cosplay intellectuals of the “national conservative” movement, he also looks to be sui generis in several ways. Hungary remains the only EU and NATO member where electoral democracy has been almost entirely subverted into a one-party state — and even so, there are signs that Orbán’s regime may be in trouble. He has carefully positioned himself as a friend to both Trump and Vladimir Putin, without flat-out violating the rules of European foreign policy. That dangerous gamble has left Hungary increasingly isolated, while failing to produce the diplomatic breakthrough in Ukraine that Orbán clearly hoped for.

And then there’s history. We’ve all spent a lot of time and book-learning energy over the past decade or so exploring the parallels between Trump’s stop-and-start ascent to power and the fascist movements of 20th-century Europe. What have we concluded? They are similar, yet different. The passions Trump has aroused, the ridicule and contempt he has provoked from opponents and the dangerous extent to which he has been misjudged or underestimated are undeniably and even uncannily reminiscent of Adolf Hitler. Back in 2017, I extracted a passage from the introduction to Joachim Fest’s landmark Hitler biography that could apply to Trump nearly word for word. What did it mean, Fest asked, to “ascribe historical greatness” to a “comical buffoon” who rose to power despite an obvious lack of qualifications? That was, he concluded, exactly “his quality of greatness”:

Look what he accomplished; look how he outfoxed and defeated every opponent. Hitler’s peculiar greatness, we might say, was essentially linked to his distinctive quality of excess. It was a tremendous outpouring of energy, for good or ill, that shattered all existing standards. … Hitler’s conduct always appeared foolish to sage political minds, and for years — indeed, virtually to the moment of his final victory — arrogant conventional wisdom did not take him seriously. The widespread mockery heaped upon him was justified by his appearance, his unhinged rhetorical flights and the theatrical atmosphere he deliberately created around himself. Yet in a manner almost impossible to describe, he stood above or outside his banal and dull-witted persona.

That still gives me chills, every time I read it. Trump’s resemblance to Benito Mussolini, on the other hand, is a different matter and largely a question of performance. It seems obvious that Trump has absorbed something of Mussolini’s strutting, peacocking oratorical style — the puffed-out chest, the surly, babyish pout, the stiff-legged, bouncing dancer’s gait — whether or not the influence is conscious or direct. But they belong to different species, in important ways: Mussolini was an intelligent, passionate and self-destructive personality who lured himself into a doomed marriage with Hitler, like one of Bluebeard’s wives, and lived long enough to regret it. His appeal to latter-day fascists is limited, given that the early success of his regime led only to servitude and then total catastrophe.

But there’s another European fascist leader of the last century who’s been hovering in the background all this time as a noteworthy exemplar. Although he bears little resemblance to Donald Trump in affect or personality (or competence, for that matter), he may offer a highly instructive model for those behind the Trumpian throne, who hope to seize the MAGA reins whenever and however Trump leaves the stage.

As Dan Kaufman observes in a fascinating essay for the New York Review of Books, Francisco Franco — the pompous, cunning self-appointed “generalissimo” who crushed the democratic-socialist Republic in the Spanish Civil War and ruled unchallenged over a Western European nation for 35 years — has recently become the focus of “renewed admiration” on the American far right.

Officially, Kaufman is reviewing English historian Paul Preston’s “Architects of Terror,” a new study of the Franco regime’s vicious criminality, and along the way offers only a few passing references to the obvious contemporary resonance of that paranoid and brutal dictatorship. That’s more than enough. You can’t read this lengthy and rigorous article, or much of anything else about Spain under Franco, without feeling the shock of recognition: Yeah, this is what they want.

For Americans of my generation, Franco was somewhere between an inexplicable cultural footnote and a ghost haunting the margins of Cold War geopolitics. For reasons I couldn’t have explained at the time, let alone now, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead” became a running joke in the early seasons of “Saturday Night Live,” delivered by Chevy Chase as host of its weekly mock news broadcast. A few years later, Franco died in a different sense, as the vanquished villain whose disappearance made possible the explosive early films of queer-cinema pioneer Pedro Almodóvar, and turned Barcelona, Madrid and Ibiza into global centers of nightclub culture.

By the time soccer superstar David Beckham left England to sign with Real Madrid in 2003, effectively launching a new era in globalized sports consumption, everyone had conveniently forgotten (or pretended to forget) just how inextricably Real had been entwined with Franco’s fascist regime. There was a certain fitting musicality to that, given that the U.S. government had also conveniently forgotten about Franco’s alliance with Hitler and Mussolini — which he had shrewdly ditched after the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 — in order to enlist him as a postwar ally in the struggle against Communism.

For that matter, as Kaufman explains, Franco’s regime tried its best to erase or explain away the virulent antisemitism of its early years, when an elaborate conspiracy theory linking Jews, Masons and Bolsheviks, adapted wholesale from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” was embraced as official ideology. If Spanish officials had little direct connection to the Nazi Holocaust, Kaufman argues, that was because the entire Jewish population had been expelled from Spain in the 15th century. After the fact, Franco’s government claimed it had quietly helped many Jews leave occupied Europe; in one of the numerous instances of right-wing whitewashing cited by Kaufman, a recent American biographer has described Franco as “not particularly anti-Semitic.”

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Franco’s regime never needed to turn allegations of antisemitism against its domestic enemies, but its shameless hypocrisy is strikingly familiar. So is the relentless persecution and demonization of internal dissent as not merely wrong-headed but profoundly evil, an attack by foreign conspirators against God, the Church, manhood, the glorious history of Spain and the natural order of things. Ethnic or linguistic minorities, including Catalan and Basque nationalists and the Galicians of northwestern Spain, were terrorized into abandoning their languages and distinct cultural practices (although many resisted), as were tiny communities of Roma people and Protestants. (Today’s Franco fans might not love that last bit.) As Almodóvar can attest, it wasn’t just that LGBTQ people were deemed to be criminals; officially, they did not exist at all.

If Spain in the 1930s may look racially homogeneous from our supposedly enlightened point of view, Kaufman indirectly makes the point that such definitions are always subjective, and subject to historical revision. He quotes an aristocratic press attaché for Franco’s Civil War forces telling an American reporter that the conflict was “a race war, not merely a class war”:

You don’t understand because you don’t realize that there are two races in Spain — a slave race and a ruler race. Those reds, from [Republican] President Azaña to the anarchists, are all slaves. It is our duty to put them back into their places — yes, put chains on them again, if you like.

I don’t imagine that Trump’s brainy tech-bro apologists would phrase things quite that bluntly, but isn’t that longing to reassert a vanished order of permanent hierarchical dominance almost exactly what drives them? There are major and significant differences, of course: Spain in the early 20th century was a premodern agrarian society ruled by a feudal aristocracy, in collaboration with the worst and most oppressive version of Roman Catholic hierarchy. But if we adjust the details a bit, that sounds awfully close to Elon Musk’s lazy storybook fantasies about charming hobbit villages protected by “hard men.”

As Kaufman documents, American right-wingers have quietly boy-crushed on Franco since at least William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1950s, who assured National Review readers that the Spanish caudillo was “an authentic national hero” who was “only as oppressive as it is necessary to be to maintain total power.” (Talk about begging the question!) Buckley was of course also supportive of Franco’s many autocratic imitators in Latin America, such as the notorious Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. If Claremont Institute pseudo-intellectuals and far-right online trolls like Jack Posobiec have become latter-day Franco-philes — I’d be willing to bet that JD Vance is at least an admirer — the reasons are both obvious and subtle.

Franco ruthlessly crushed vigorous and diverse internal opposition while adapting to changing global circumstances. He distanced himself just enough from capital-F fascism to pretend to be something else after the fall of Hitler and Mussolini, and most of the so-called free world played along, for reasons that can only be described as cowardly, cynical and despicable.

Relying on a simplistic narrative of patriotism, religious faith, benevolent oligarchic rule and the restoration of lost national glory, Franco largely succeeded in fighting off the enormous social and cultural changes of the postwar decades. More than anything else, he endured, ruling an increasingly backward and damaged country long enough to become a joke on late-night TV immediately after his death in 1975.

One could construct an argument — and some of his present-tense fans surely have done so — that Franco’s regime offers an example of fascist rule at its most effective and successful. Therein lies a dilemma, because Franco was not an especially compelling orator or a magnetic, mercurial personality after the fashion of Hitler, Mussolini and, you know, others we could name. Those who believe that “America is going to need a Protestant Franco,” to quote one Claremont deep-thinker, must be hoping they won’t have to wait much longer.